SoundCloud Nears Deal To Sell Majority Stake To Private Equity Firms. A pair of private equity firms are reportedly close to each taking a separate stake in the unprofitable music streamer that would collectively mean the acquisition of a majority of the company.

YouTube Red And Google Play Music To Merge, Says Lyor Cohen. Cohen didn’t talk timescale or details, but Google has issued its own statement to The Verge confirming that the plans are afoot, following its decision to combine the two services’ teams in February this year.

SESAC Strikes Landmark US Radio Deal. The private US-based licensing organization has reached a new deal with the Radio Music License Committee, which the PRO claims will result in substantially larger rates for its clients that ASCAP’s equivalent agreement.

Pandora Shuts Down In Australia And New Zealand After 5 Years. “We’re honored to have connected so many listeners with the music they love these past few years. Thank you for your loyalty and the opportunity to serve you.”

ASCAP-BMI Song Database Plan Rollout Questioned. Some industry executives said the nearly two-year-long effort to create a single database is a step in the right direction, but others are disappointed that it omits key data and for now excludes SESAC and Global Music Rights.

PBS CEO Warns Federal Cuts Will Mean ‘A Number’ of Stations Will Shut Down. Many of those stations are in rural and underserved areas, she said, with residents who either don’t have access to cable or satellite or can’t afford it and who rely on over-the-air broadcasting.

Story of the Week

Pandora CEO Tim Westergren May Be Stepping Down, According to a New ReportAccording to Recode, Pandora hasn’t selected a replacement for Westergren, sources say; he will likely stay on at the company he founded 17 years ago until a new CEO is in place.

Top Music News Highlights

Pandora [P] Stock Up On Report Of CEO Westergren’s Exit. Wall Street seemed to approve of the potential changes at Pandora, with Pandora stock up 2.78% to $8.51 by mid-day trading.

Apple Wants To Reduce Royalty Rate It Pays Record Labels. According to a report from Bloomberg, the Cupertino giant’s long-term licensing deals with the labels for both Apple Music and iTunes are due to expire at the end of this month.

Other Music News Highlights

Pandora Sells Ticketfly To Eventbrite For $200M, A $250M Loss. The Ticketfly transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2017 — Eventbrite is funding the acquisition using a combination of $150 million in cash and a $50 million note payable to Pandora.

Story of the Week

SiriusXM’s Pandora Buyout Could Be Back On
That’s according to a new report from the New York Post, which suggests that Sirius recently restarted talks with Pandora’s banks and is currently “discussing the size of a potential offer.”

Top Music News Highlights

Pandora Sued By PayPal For Alleged ‘Harmful’ Logo Infringement. PayPal’s suit, filed on May 19, claims: “The similarities between the logos are striking, obvious, and patently unlawful. Just like the PayPal logo, the Pandora logo is a capital P in block style, sans serif, with no counter, in the same deep-blue color range.”

France’s Sacem Posts Record Revenues of $1.5 Billion. Of that total, $1.3 billion was paid out to members and affiliate neighboring rights organizations (up 2% on 2015) with just under $67 million invested in almost 2,000 creative and cultural sustainability projects – including financial support for music venues and festivals – to help “ensure long term growth for the industry.”

The MP3 Is Dead, Long Live The MP3. The last of the patents related to the MP3 format expired (or will very soon), so patent-holder Fraunhofer IIS has nothing left to license.

Top Music News Story

Fans Have A Growing Willingness To Actually Pay For Music
Music fans are showing a growing willingness to actually pay for music, and that is helping to drive the current growth in the recorded music industry. In fact, the value of those fans grew 11% last year driven by tens of millions of $10 per month on-demand subscriptions, according to MusicWatch’s Annual Music Study.

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“Music Streaming Still Needs To Get A Lot Easier For Consumers.” In an exclusive interview with MBW, Steve Boom discusses Amazon’s ambitions in digital music, streaming’s potential to grow globally, the tricky subject of artist exclusives and free vs. paid- plus the small matter of how we’re all going to listen to music in future.

Top Music News Story

Spotify To Sign New Licensing Deals With Major Labels ‘Within Weeks’?
The Financial Times is reporting optimistic news: it says that “licensing talks have picked up considerably” between the Spotify and Universal Music Group – and even that “deals [with the major labels] could be inked within weeks.”

According to the FT’s sources, Spotify has changed stance on one crucial point: finally agreeing to allow blockbuster album releases to be ‘windowed’ on its premium tier.

Drake Has Reportedly Generated More Than $50m On Spotify. A spokesperson said: “Drake continues to break Spotify records, including his own, and is now the number one streamed artist and the first to reach over 10 billion streams.

Universal Inks Deal With MelodyVR For ‘Revolutionary Music VR Experiences.’ MelodyVR says it will be creating experiences with UMG artists including sell-out concerts, live performances, immersive music videos and intimate behind-the-scenes content.

Chance The Rapper Says Apple Music Paid $500,000 For 2 Week “Coloring Book” Exclusive. “I just wanna remain transparent, folks out there without a deal need to know they’re doing everything right just keep at it…I think (an) artist can gain a lot from the streaming wars as long as they remain in control of their own product.”

Pandora Not For Sale, Will Be Profitable This Year, Says Pandora CEO As Stock Falls. Pandora founder and CEO Tom Westergren made some bold claims during a CNBC appearance Monday — Wall Street seemed unimpressed, pushing the stock -6.3% to $11.60 by midday Tuesday.

Top Music News Story

Spotify Acquires Audio Detection Startup Sonalytic To Improve Publishing Data
Spotify has acquired Sonalytic, a UK based startup that specializes in audio identification that enables us to connect creators and rights-holders to monetization opportunities.

Spotify says it will use Sonalytic audio detection to improve its personalized playlists and to match songs with compositions to improve their publishing data system. Publishing data and subsequent payments have been a source of tension between the music streamer and music publishers and songwriters.

Other Music News Highlights

Opinion 1: “Spotify Could Use It’s New Acquisition To Take On Shazam.” Hypebot reports that, “in addition to its public intent to use Sonalytic’s audio detection to improve its personalized playlists and to match songs with compositions to improve their publishing data system, Spotify could use it to build its own Shazam.”

Liberty: We’d Buy Pandora… For $1bn Less Than We Offered Last Year. At the Deutsche Bank Media, Internet & Telecom Conference in Florida, Greg Maffei stated that Liberty believes Pandora’s “stock is overvalued. We will not pay the current market price so I think it’s very unlikely we’re going to end up buying them.”

Amazon Is Getting Involved In The Music Festival Business. The plans will involve a “physical festival presence” which could include “on-site food and product delivery, custom tour merchandise for purchase, artist meet and greets, and convenience amenities such as free Wi-Fi, water, charging stations, and restrooms”.

4,000 Songwriters Sign NMPA Petition As Copyright Royalty Rate Hearings Heat Up. The NMPA, in a statement last week, said, “This week the most important trial most people have never heard of will begin in Washington, D.C.”

Pandora Shares Spike on Report It’s Open to SiriusXM Deal Talks

Story of the Week
Shares of music-streaming provider Pandora shot up as much as 17% Friday, after CNBC reported the company was open to discussing a sale to satellite-radio service SiriusXM.

Following the CNBC report, Reuters reported that Pandora is not undertaking any new effort to find a buyer, citing an anonymous source. That’s consistent with what Pandora execs said earlier this year, after a New York Times report in February that the company was seeking to sell itself.

According to the CNBC, Pandora has “expressed a willingness to engage” in deal talks with “longtime suitor” SiriusXM, which is majority-owned by John Malone’s Liberty Media. The potential talks between the companies were in “the first inning of the process,” per the report, citing unidentified sources.

Top Music News Stories

SiriusXM Must Pay Up To $99M In Flo & Eddie Class Action Settlement. The settlement guarantees $25 million payment vs. a 5.5% license for 10 years, which is worth between $45.47 million to $59.2 million, assuming the satelitte streamer plays the other class members at the same play rate as they have in the past.

Record Label A&R Spend Grew By $300m Last Year According to IFPI Report. The figure, along with many others, comes from a new IFPI report “Investing In Music,” co-signed by both the majors and worldwide independent label group WIN.

iHeart Launches Napster-Powered Subscription Service. “Ten times more Americans listen to radio every month than use a subscription service – so the debut of iHeartRadio Plus and iHeartRadio All Access powered by Napster is a unique opportunity to capture these non-music subscribers with an on-demand service built around radio.”

Dubsmash Adds $9.6 Million For Viral Music Video Lip-Sync App. The Berlin-based Dubsmash added $9.6 million in series B funding to expand its viral music video lip-sync app, after having previously raised $6 million.

Music Tech Startup Soundstr Closes $1.1M In Seed Financing. Soundstr’s patent-pending technology offers tracking data to the manner in which venues and businesses pay for the use of music, and songwriters receive royalties.

SoundExchange Asks U.S. Copyright Royalty Board For Major Rate Increases

Story of the Week
SoundExchange has submitted a new rate proposal and testimony in the SDARS III royalty rate proceeding from which the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) will set rates for the years 2018-2022 for Sirius XM’s satellite radio service, as well as, cable/satellite TV music services provided by Music Choice and Muzak.

SoundExchange has proposed a rate that is the greater of either 23% of revenue or $2.48 per subscriber per month in 2018 with annual increases. The current rates for Sirius XM are 10.5% of Sirius XM’s “Gross Revenues” in 2016 and 11% in 2017. For Music Choice and Muzak, SoundExchange has proposed a per subscriber per month rate starting at $ 0.019 per subscriber per month with annual increases. The current rate is 8.5% of Gross Revenues in both 2016 and 2017.

The CRB will hold a hearing beginning April 19, 2017, which will last several weeks. After final briefing by the parties, the CRB will issue its rate determination by December 15, 2017.

NMPA Calls For Facebook To Sign Music Publishing Deals. “Facebook’s inactivity and unresponsiveness has left publishers no other choice but to attempt to remove the music that amounts to stealing from their songwriters — To aid in this effort, NMPA and our member publishers have sent thousands of takedown requests, but this is merely a drop in the bucket.”

Does The Music Industry Need To Dump Non-Discretionary Pricing? MiDiA Research’s Mark Mulligan claims in a new blog piece that one of streaming music’s top priorities “should be to ensure that European music fans get a fair deal compared to their US peers.”

Sub Pop’s Founder Launched A Fun Music Remixing App. 8Stem is an extremely slick mobile app for iOS that turns remixing into a simple drag and drop process — Find a song you like (Seattle-based Merge signee Telekinesis jumped out at me), click Remix This, and the app will lay it out, broken down into wave forms and sections.

Story of the Week

Pandora Nears Deals For On-Demand Streaming
Pandora Media Inc. is aiming to start expanding its internet-radio service as soon as next month, offering its hallmark free tier as well as two new monthly subscription options that will mark its foray into on-demand music streaming, said people familiar with the matter.

While the music industry broadly supports the new paid tiers, some record-label executives are still wary of granting Pandora permission to launch its free service in new foreign markets without the ability to control which songs they put on the free tier.

The foreign expansion could jump-start growth for Pandora, which has seen its listenership plateau in recent years at about 80 million active monthly users. Most listeners use Pandora’s free tier, with about 4 million subscribing to an ad-free version of its service, Pandora One, for $5 a month.

Top Music News Stories

Dubset Inks Deal With Sony/ATV. The Sony/ATV news comes on the heels of Dubset’s landmark rights agreement with the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), giving hundreds of independent songwriters and publishers access to an emerging new royalty system.

Russian Collection Societies Break Ties Amidst Fog of Fraud. Earlier this month, several rights holders registered with RAO called for the organization’s management to be replaced and that fundamental changes to its charter be made, amidst major allegations of embezzlement.

A Primer for the World of Music Licensing and Its Pricing. To help readers better understand this labyrinthine world, Ed Christman at Billboard put together an explainer, organized from simple to complex.